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Writing a résumé

Yourrésumé is a marketing tool. It conveys your professional identity, with the goal of helping you get a job. It does this by telling potential employers what you’ve done and what you can do for them. Think of your résumé as a living document; you’ll want to tailor it specifically to match each job you apply for.

General guidelines

Use keywords that are specific to the job you want. Employers and recruiters often search online job banks for candidates; they’ll type in keywords to narrow down the field. To figure out what keywords to use, consult multiple postings for jobs you’re interested in. What words come up most frequently? Those are your key words; make sure they appear in your résumé. For example, if you’re looking for a job as a fundraiser, some relevant key words would be development, growth, campaigns, grants, gifts, and donors.

Use action verbs to describe your responsibilities and achievements. The verbs you choose will vary depending on your field, but here are some good choices that apply to many different types of work: managed, achieved,trained, improved,created,developed, implemented, led. See Writing an impressive job application for more dynamic action verbs.

Use short, bulleted phrases, and parallelism to keep your style clear and consistent. Write “Supervised team of three designers” instead of using the full sentence “I supervised a team of three designers.” Remember to keep verb forms parallel from entry to entry.

Be concise. A student or entry-level résumé should fit on one page, unless that applicant is unusually accomplished. Experienced professionals may need two or more pages, but should make sure all content included is relevant to the position they are applying for.

Use bold type, bullet points, and a standard font size and page margin to make your résumé easy to read. The exception to this is if you are saving your résumé as a text document; see more on this below.

Types of résumés

The chronological résumé lists all your experience in reverse chronological order, starting with your most recent position. This is the usual approach for people who are established and staying in a particular field, and who do not have significant gaps in their work history.

The functional or skills-basedrésumé emphasizes transferable skills rather than the jobs you have held. This approach is best for people who are changing careers and those with noticeable gaps in their work history.

Formatting your résumé

Once upon a time, a word-processed résumé made perfect sense, because you usually either mailed your résumé or handed it to someone. Today, however, you’ll often be emailing your résumé or uploading it to an online application system. The formatting you worked so hard on can mysteriously change when someone else prints your documents. Further, some online systems do not accept word-processed documents. And while a PDF version of your résumé will preserve your original formatting, some online systems don’t accept this type of file either.

For these instances, you may need to create a plain text document. Résumés prepared this way are not always pretty to look at, but it’s the only format accepted by many online systems.

Text documents contain no bold, italics,bullets, or tabs, so once you’ve converted your résumé to this format, review it and make any changes you can to improve its appearance.

If chunks of text are hard to read, try adding extra spaces.

You could also use all capital letters for headings, and asterisks where you originally had bullets.

Structuring Your Résumé

Here are the main categories to include in a résumé:

Contact Information

This includes your name, address, phone number, and email address.

If you have a professional website, include the URL for that, too. But if your website is about a favorite hobby (collecting vintage records, for example, or snowboarding), do not include it in your résumé.